Hugo Rifkind

Spare a thought for the sons of dictators. Not a nice thought — that would be overkill. Still, spare one all the same. The dictators themselves are somehow easier to understand. Start out as a freedom fighter, get carried away, end up as a murderous tyrant dressed in a beret and a full-body lampshade. Fine. But the sons? What’s going on there? Saif Gaddafi’s appearance on Libyan TV at the start of the week was something pretty special. Arabic is a language which I suspect we’re culturally programmed to find vaguely intimidating even when it’s being used to whisper a lullaby, but his body language said more than the subtitles. Beyond Scorsese, more the full Mario Puzo.

My favourite document in the cache released by the Cabinet Office this week is the one that starts ‘Dear Muammar’ and ends ‘yours sincerely, Gordon Brown’. My favourite document in the cache released by the Cabinet Office this week is the one that starts ‘Dear Muammar’ and ends ‘yours sincerely, Gordon Brown’. Have you seen it? In the first sentence, our former prime minister reminds the Libyan despot that they recently met at a G8 summit. Pretty bleak, that. It is as though Brown felt close enough to the freakout dayglo bampot of the Middle East to address him by his first name, but not so close that he was confident Gaddafi would actually remember who he was.

Where does the Big Society stand on the screamers on the bus? We had one the other day. It was during the rush hour, and I was late to pick up my daughter from the nursery. It was a big lady, heavily upholstered in beige, dragging a trolley almost the same size which was upholstered in tartan. The bus jolted, she almost fell, and we all rushed to help her, like David Cameron surely reckons we’re supposed to. That should have been that. The next time the bus stopped, though, she was off up the aisle, trolley battering through plenty of people older and fatter than her, to shriek at the driver. Leave it, love, said some. It’s busy, he didn’t mean it, no harm done, we all want to get home. But she was a screamer. Poor woman. None of us had realised.

The defining commentary of this on-going financial crisis, for me, came from Gerald Hill of the Midlands, in a letter to the Times in March 2009. ‘Sir,’ he wrote, ‘I can now understand the term “quantitative easing” but realise I no longer understand the meaning of the word “money”.’ I’m with Gerald. Take the IMF and EU bailout to Ireland, intended to calm market fears over that country’s debt crisis. I understand ‘IMF’ and I understand ‘EU’. I understand ‘bailout’ and I understand what a ‘debt crisis’ is, and why this particular one has happened.

The first time I saw my name in print, in almost its own right, was in late 1997, after a person who was a friend, but isn’t one any more, called up Londoners’ Diary and told a young journalist who would later become a friend, but wasn’t one at the time, that I’d helped to organise a Cambridge student demonstration against tuition fees. The first time I saw my name in print, in almost its own right, was in late 1997, after a person who was a friend, but isn’t one any more, called up Londoners’ Diary and told a young journalist who would later become a friend, but wasn’t one at the time, that I’d helped to organise a Cambridge student demonstration against tuition fees. Obviously it was really about my dad, but I had a starring role.

This morning, on the way up to my desk, I bought a croissant. In doing so, I immediately penalised almost everybody who sits anywhere near me, because I had one and none of them did. And I didn’t even feel particularly guilty about it. I’m a right bastard, me. And that’s not all. I came into work by Tube, using my Oyster card. In doing so, I now realise I was penalising all those people out there who would be just as good at doing my job as I am, but can’t afford the £2 to get to Wapping. If I had any decency, any soul, I’d forgo Transport for London altogether, and my bike (which I penalised bikeless people by buying), and walk to work, thereby creating a level playing field. But I don’t. A bastard, like I said.

Do you think it might be possible to plot a link between the apparently vast pool of girls who dream of sleeping with Wayne Rooney for cash, and how rubbish The Vicar of Dibley was? I’m keen that we should. In general, in fact, I feel the rubbishness of The Vicar of Dibley should be considered the cause of as many world evils as we can throw at it. Disease, war, earthquakes, whatever we’ve got. You know those teary-eyed socialists who loathe Tony Blair because they used to love him, but then he betrayed them over Iraq? I’m like that with Richard Curtis. When I was a teenager, the man was my god. He wrote Blackadder. And then, The Vicar of Bloody Dibley. Jesus Christ, what a thing to do.

People don’t half talk a lot of dross about the burka. Or rather, the burka doesn’t half make people talk a lot of dross, about everything else. Nicolas Sarkozy, the four-foot-tall French President, has decided that his countrywomen don’t have a ‘right’ to wear the burka. Damian Green, our own, taller, immigration minister, has decided that British women do have a ‘right’ to wear the burka. I haven’t a clue what either of them are on about. I wonder if they do. It’s easy to get bogged down in this one. There’s altogether too much going on.

I once wrote a column about Camden Council, the total bastards, stealing my car. Never had a response like it. Lawyers got in touch, offering their services. Motorist groups wanted to sign me up. Readers wrote in, offering other tales of total Camden bastardy, or similar bastardy from elsewhere, and Tom Conti invited me round for a coffee. It was the first time I properly realised that modern Britain does, after all, possess a fearless, freedom-loving backbone. It’s just peculiarly preoccupied with things like parking tickets. No disrespect intended to the glowering love interest from Shirley Valentine, but I always thought freedom was supposed to be sexier than this.

This is going to be a wibbling and self-indulgent column, so don’t say you haven’t been warned. There are various reasons for this, but chief among them is the fact that I’m on holiday right now, in St Tropez. It’s possible that you already know this, if the Spectator overlords have decided to put one of those ‘dateline: St Tropez’ bits at the top, but it’s also possible that they thought it was a bit wibbling and self-indulgent for that, and didn’t bother. And anyway, I’m not actually in St Tropez, but in an idyllic hill village a few miles outside. This is a state of affairs I hope will long continue, what with the modern St Tropez being full of plastic surgery, boat fumes, and the temptation to buy overpriced sunglasses.

You can’t trust the disabled. A lot of them are faking it. In the last year, there were 16,535 blue badges and 21,000 free bus passes cancelled by local councils, due to fraudulent use. Bloody disabled. They’re having a laugh. Imagine you were a local council. Don’t be squeamish. You can be a Tory one, if you like, from somewhere nice. Anyway, you’re this council, or a bit of it, and you have your suspicions that somebody is using a blue badge who shouldn’t be. Some young bloke, say, who got it off his Gran and now uses it, allegedly, to park each day outside his office.